Friday, October 28, 2011

A Confluence of Coincidences or Something Significant?

We are, admittedly, smitten with the 1964 Socorro UFO sighting by Lonnie Zamora.

The reasons for our “obsession” are many, as noted here, at this blog (and others) over the past few years.

But one reason centers on the knowledge that other, similar, almost identical UFO sightings took place on the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting [4/24/1964] or in the same time-frame.

For instance, a day after Officer Zamora’s episode, witness Orlando Gallegos saw an object, in La Madera, New Mexico [a few hundred miles north of Socorro] that was virtually identical to the Socorro craft.

And Gary Wilcox, in Newark Valley, New York, on April 24th, 1964, the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting, reported a strange encounter with an egg-shaped craft that was accompanied by two “beings” (like those seen by Zamora), dressed in white, metallic coveralls.

Farmer Wilcox, who couldn’t have known about Lonnie Zamora’s encounter – Wilcox’s incident took place at 10 a.m. in the morning; Zamora’s incident took place about 6:50 p.m.

While Lonnie Zamora had no interaction with the two beings he spotted and Gallegos saw no beings during his sighting, Wilcox had a “conversation” with the intruders on his land; they said they were from Mars, and had “spoken to people before.”

Details of the Wilcox sighting can be read HERE and you will find our May 2011 note about the Wilcox sighting HERE

What is revelatory for me, is that it is strangely coincidental that such similar sightings took place around or on the same date, with timings that don’t allow confabulation.

Anthony Bragalia and Frank Stalter discount the Socorro sighting as a bona fide UFO incident, claiming the sighting was prompted by a raft of New Mexico Institute Technology students, out to embarrass Officer Zamora ostensibly because he “harassed” them. Bragalia also dismisses the Gallegos’ sighting as there were implications, by the police at the scene, that the smell of alcohol was present.

But how do Stalter and Bragalia explain the Wilcox sighting?

And how do we slide our Hughes lunar-lander prototype into the Wilcox scenario?

The problem with the Bragalia/Stalter conjecture – although circumstantially replete – and our Hughes Aircraft hypothesis lies in the distance between Newark Valley, New York and Socorro, New Mexico, the only concrete connection being the “New” sobriquet for the states.

(Of course, one can make a claim that the “New” in New York and New Mexico has meaning, paranormally, but that for another time.)

My point is that the prank explanation for Socorro and the Hughes testing hypothesis are tangential (and errant) when one takes into account the strange Wilcox tale, and also, somewhat, the Gallegos sighting.

Something bizarre happened in late April 1964, something that hasn’t been duplicated since.

Of course a lack of recidivism works against Socorro, La Madera, and the Newark valley incidents being relevant to the UFO phenomenon, in toto, but such similar incidents can provide a clue, as transient as hat clue may be, to what UFOs are or were.

That said (or, rather, written), the three sightings noted here allow us to downplay or even dismiss the prank theory for Socorro, along with our Hughes prototype conjecture….if we are being ufologically objective.

30 Comments:

Richie, you gotta know the difference between your correlations and causations. Just because there are some curious similarities between Zamora and Wilcox doesn't mean there's a connection. There is also one significant difference: no one seriously question whether the Zamora incident happened at all. It absolutely did, the only question that remains is who was there and the best evidence overwhelmingly points to NMIMT students.

Again, yes, you and Bragalia have mustered some intriguing circumstantial -- and I accent the word, circumstantial -- "evidence" for your prank hypothesis, but it still just remains an hypothesis; there is no smoking gun or smoking debris, as it were.

Present a definitive conclusion and I'm with you.

But, as it is, you fellows have not made the case -- and I am not alone in that observation.

To overlook the grotesque similarities between Wilcox's incident, Zamora's, and Gallegos' is an investigatory flaw that UFO researchers have embraced ever since Roswell.

I'd like to accept your prank view, and that of my friend, Tony Bragalia, but it is too glib, too facile.

I'm as enamoured with the Wilcox case as you are with Zamora. I'd very much like to see the police report that Schwarz referred to so heavily.

The 'UFO Enigma' is notoriously hard to find a pattern in and I don't need to give examples to show why. Despite this, the 'egg-shaped' craft has had some small uniformity in the reports.

The dimensions are reasonably similar and two little guys appear nearby. They take off with flames present in a couple of the cases too. As to whether they fire (Valensole), chat (Wilcox) or flee (Socorro, Pons) is where certainty packs up and leaves again. Predictably.

I just can't subscribe to the Socorro Hoax theory and I've tried hard to imagine how it could be achieved today. Likewise, I've got trouble trying to imagine a test-craft out there without any support.

I almost wish that we could experience a sightings wave like the European one in '54. With all our progress in psychology, physiology and technology, it's tempting to think that *we* could do better and identify what the heck was happening.

For now, I don't think it's unreasonable to entertain the notion that Zamora and Wilcox saw/experienced the same thing.

With all due respect Richie, if this prank was a snake it would have bit ya'.

The evidence for a prank goes way beyond the circumstantial. Firstly, you have Zamora's account. He's very clear about what he said he saw and more importantly what he didn't. He never saw anything land, never saw anyone enter or exit a vehicle, didn't even see 4 legs on it. That's because it never landed, never had anyone get in or out and never had 4 legs. Then you have the follow up investigators who said the burning on the ground was sporadic and cool by the time Chavez arrived. Then you have the geography itself. It was perfect for pulling off this kind of illusion.

All this is most definitely not circumstantial, it's as physical as you can get and it's consistent with what the only eyewitness states. Say what you want about Zamora, on that day and under extraordinary circumstances, he was a really good witness.

We are not doing something right when it comes to sightings that are cloaked in similarities that stand outside the statistical probabilities of coincidence.

The hoax hypothesis of Bragalia and Stalter is salted, I have to say, with some interesting circumstantial information, but that information has not received the kind of substantiation which would explain the Socorro episode to my satisfaction, and I am open to the prank possibility (somewhat).

As for the Hughes Aircraft test, I've placed a clip online here, earlier, from a guy who says that was what Zamora saw, and the guy had the patina of credibility about him.

Moreover, the information we've gathered is as viable as the prank information, that is to say, not conclusive surely, but interesting.

I think that, with the La Madera sighting and the bizarre Wilcox account, we're dealing with something not as prosaic as a prototype test or a prank.

Of course prank is tough to accept, Richie. Even after Tony started talking to people like Colgate and others, I was skeptical. It wasn't until I looked at Zamora's initial statement and then the physical location itself I started to see how the prank was more and more likely and then the additional documents from the Dailykos article were pointed out to me and backed up the prank scenario. There's really nothing behind any other scenario that goes beyond speculation and the coincidences you have to accept for any of those to be true are just too much to swallow. I still consider this case to be a great one . . . solved.

I like Frank (despite his love of the Flyers, which defies logic), but the prank explanation simply doesn't hold water. I've stood on the exact same spot that Zamora did as well, and there's no way I can see some students pulling a prank like that today on an experienced police officer, much less back then. The descriptions of Zamora also don't jibe with a prank.

I don't think it was ET either, but a prank? As Rich notes, it should say something that almost everyone, from true believers to ardent disbelievers in the ETH, reject it as an answer.

Sgt. David Moody thought it was a hoax and he was on site investigating for the USAF. Can't say why they didn't pull the trigger and make that the official explanation but they didn't . . . and let's go Flyers!

Tony Bragalia might be better to answer this, but as far as I've been told, no NMIT student has publically admitted to being part of the prank or knowing about it; that's publically...privately, Mr. Bragalia has gotten admittances of a kind.

I wanted to make a point, which you allow, with your comment, inadvertently, that people commenting here, you this time, would sidetrack the discussion to deal with a sidebar; in this instance, a debate about logic and rationality, both grist for a nice back-and-forth but tangential to the gist of the posting.

You took, for example, a throwaway remark I made, and wanted to go at it.

Almost everyone who visits here attempts to go off point, and I keep trying to stop them.

I would have preferred to see something from your astute mind that deals with the content about Socorro, Wilcox, and Gallegos, that's all.

As for time, I have lots of it, obviously, but not so much as to be detoured by an offer to discuss the elements of logic or rational thinking, at least not in this venue.

An interesting post in a period where they are sorely lacking. After digesting several theories and discarding them, I think what we might have is an energetic atmospheric phenomenon, that is as random as the weather, and is similar in it's characteristics to climactic phases. One example is pressure fronts as an analogy, which can cover a huge geographic area, producing similar effects, while a local observer without the benefit of upper atmospheric observations would rightfully claim they are random. The relationship to what I see as plasmas as a enormous source of localized energy in relation to biology, and the mind, seems to infer the closer the proximity the more profound physical and\or perceptual effects. Hence, the anthropomorphism of bias projection leads to a sort of myth reinvented once as a panoply of Gods made extraterrestrial in a technical age as harbingers of the environment conditions, ( Thor as the source of thunder). The social script uses a template to create variants in the population, that in sum total are sheer lunacy, tellingly incoherent, if taken as a aggregate sum. There is something very bizarre happening, whose "seasons" of localized anomalies could be made more predictable if perhaps we studied more atmospheric conditions ( now with better data)rather than what are waking dreams caused by an environmental impacts on our biology. Perhaps not.

The atmospherics conjecture is interesting but a bit too uncomplex for me.

There is more, it seems to me, to such accounts than plasma effects or climatological peculiarities.

While climate and weather extremes do cause mental aberrations -- such as depression when Low Pressure fronts (causing rain usually) are in an area -- such weather extremes can only be a part, a small part if any part at all, of what is experienced by persons such as Wilcox, Zamora, or Gallegos (and others).

I was not suggesting the climatic environment as a sole cause in a complex but rather one of several particulars in a proverbial integer.Any single bullet theory is the result of social scripting and compression as well as reductionism. There seems to be a "perfect storm" scenario at play that has a constituent mathematical model at play rather than extraterrestrials, demons, visions or X craft alone, whose aggregate sum of observation is chaotically absurd which suggests a link to perceptual biology rather than gnomes.

That is the divisional and comparative dialog we have, which is always interesting. We do have a biological propensity to make the simple patterns we see, complex, granted. However, the process of measuring this phenomenon, if it is measurable is an editorial and preoperative recognition of patterns in behaviorism that are already predisposed in a butterfly effect. This is the flaw in any logic as it is self referential. To my mind, any causation in any phenomenon, it appears simple once discovered, complex prior to recognition. The deeper we dig, the more complex reality suggests it is, so I highly doubt we can say it's either complex or simple at this point as a binary. Again I think a predisposition toward what we gather is pretty much a butterfly effect and a pox on both our houses. LOL.

At any rate, one can dig deeper or drill down into such accounts as those cited here, and one who thinks they are an investigator or researcher should do so.

However, at the facile level there are elements in each account that can be lumped together and discerned for their similarities.

That leads one to a comparative analysis, and maybe to a root explanation.

Yet, we end up getting not very far because the instigator or instigation of each event remains beyond understanding.

But accumulating the similar, or in these accounts, the identical elements can lead us to the source, even though that source will probably remain inscrutable.

It's the Face-of-God thing.

Once we see it, what do we know?

We don't know the essence. Nor do we know that motivations are at work.

The mystery remains intact.

One can only say, as I have, that these three accounts stem from the same cause or source, and that source either changed modus or disappeared somewhere along the way as no further accounts have the same accoutrements.

Thus we are dealing with a unique set of circumstances or a scenario unique to the time-frame.

Or....we have a one-time tattoo that meant to tell us something but we didn't get it (at the time, or even now).

Mucking around for plasmatic explanations or an understanding of the real reality doesn't help, and maybe isn't supposed to.

And playing along with the gamester is just a time-waster, as that gamester (some call it the trickster, a term I abhor) is not about to clue us in to what this existence is all about.

It never has, and never will it seems, as the "game" is what this existence is for....the Game of God I call it.

I think it's reasonable to suggest it's our game hosted by a variety of contingencies. The inner and the outer is only a potential point of contact. One without the other separates a rock from a human being. The destination is neither outer or inner, but the creation of third state. One gets hung up on outer the other in inner. Neither one is the game itself. This may be the ultimate expression of a dualism where both are props, meaning nothing in of themselves, like a leg separated from a body while the body is yet to be created. The phenomenon may be the symbiosis of such a state that we know nothing of, in terms of our self referential orientations. Neither A nor B, and this will keep us going I suspect long after the cows come home.

Another difference into what is the essence of universals the the significance of particulars. I think what each of us views as tangential are reflective of what is occurring is creatively oppositional by a simple (as you say) predisposition as a butterfly effect our differing views make for an enjoyable sort of bifolded mirror on the subject. Again, this was a great post at a time where, in my humble opinion, they are scant.

I think there truly is a tie in between Cary Wilcox and Lonnie Zamora and mixed that in with Ernest Norman and you have and underground martian civilization. They KNOW how to cloak their flying crafts so you don't see them much. With the exception of Gary Wilcox's experience at 10 am April 24th, 1964.

Ernest Norman's "The Truth About Mars" should be a serious read even if your not a Unarian which I am not. Also the Curiosity mars images and REALLY look for artifacts because they are there.